René Descartes gives few philosophical arguments to directly support his rejection of forms in favor of mechanisms . Moreover, the scattered reasons he offers in his corpus are cryptic and hard to unpack. Hence I will draw on Descartes’ intellectual context to reconstruct his reasoning and shed light on his historic elimination of Scholastic Aristotelian substantial forms from the physical world. Given that Descartes continues to call the soul a substantial form , my focus will be on his rejection of material substantial forms employed in Aristotelian physics (for lack of a better term I will refer to all substantial forms that exist only in matter, ., all except.
